Comments by Thomas Söllner, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York
TO TRAP A SNAP: In their paper, Thomas Söllner and his colleagues assigned functions to previouslly identified components of a transport pathway between various cellular compartments.
Vesicles, Söllner explains, are the primary mediators of "the transfer of cargo between different compartments in eukaryotic cells. For example, in the secretory pathway, proteins are transported from the endoplasmic reticulum to the Golgi apparatus and finally to the plasma membrane via membrane-bound vesicles."
In each of these steps, he elaborates, "the vesicles bud and pinch off the donor compartment, and are selectively targeted to their destination, where the vesicle `docks' onto the receiving compartment and [where] two membranes fuse with each other," thus releasing the protein to the next compartment.
Over the course of about 20 years, Rothman's group discovered the proteins involved in the vesicle docking and fusion. They identified three major ...
